I’ve been corresponding with blogger and VC Jean-Yves Quentel about this point because of his experience with Ubuntu. Here’s what he had to say today about KVM:

While it makes sense for RHEL to offer KVM, I wonder what exactly the Ubuntu team has in mind. Do they want to ease the migration of the Windows users to Ubuntu by making it easier to run the Windows programs that really can’t do without and are not being ported to Linux (games, perhaps)? Would it even work? Do they want to go after the enterprise/server market in a big way now? That’d be bad news for Red Hat and even worse for Mandriva.

Judging from comments made at last month’s UbuCon in New York City, I’d say the answer to that last server question is probably yes.

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KVM is in the mainline kernel - every distro will include it. It has no real correlation to Windows so I'm not sure why the focus on Windows other than it can run a virtual Windows instance just like a Linux instance. KVM essentially turns the Linux instance into a hypervisor. With KVM, there's no need to use Xen. You can run multiple virtual Linux servers (or desktop instances). Even for desktop instances though, KVM is more likely to power a hosted client server where multiple desktop clients would run on the server vs traditional fat clients. KVM is a bit early though for server usage - will be some time before it's widely used or feature competitive to Xen.

Hello, I Found this blog from a Google search to run Kernel-based Virtual Machine. I am running Feisty Fawn Beta, and I have long (10 years) since been a full time Linux user. I am not converting to Linux at this stage. Having said that, the reason I would like to run XP under KVM are so I can run some design tools, specifically illustrator and quark xpress. I design my own artwork exclusively with Inkscape and The Gimp, however I exchange files with other designers quite a bit that I need access to, so I can either change the format to something that will work in Gimp, or so I can generate a file to be sent to the printing press. I have not attempted wine, because I have used wine very much in the past, and would rather a solid experience running the application in its native environment. I hope this helps you understand why Ubuntu, or any other distribution might include KVM in their distro.

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